


burn outs

by allrisenim



Category: Super Junior
Genre: Angst, Break Up, M/M, Sad, also im tired its 4am and theres probably typos everywhere, very very sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 05:03:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16509860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allrisenim/pseuds/allrisenim
Summary: When the flame goes out all that's left is the burn





	burn outs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [andcntes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/andcntes/gifts).



> hhhhhh it's angst, it's also kind of short. and it jumps between past and present and it could just be me being sad and incoherent.... i.... it might be shite.

The first spark starts on a Wednesday, not too different from this one.

 

The power had gone out that night, abandoned the space between to a saturnine gloom, save for the lambent flick of a tongue. Temerarious accusations turn into lapping flames, decorated against the pull of his body:

 

 _Why don’t you have time for me anymore. Why don’t we love._ **_Love_ ** _._

 

He feels the sting first under the skin of his nails and then in angry runnels up his arms; a part of him wants to bite back, tell the other _he’s wrong_ , that _he’s a stupid child,_ and that _he doesn’t know any better._ But that would make them both, fatuous children, unwilling to listen, and equally unwilling to bend. Pride is the horsemen to the fire that fulminates all around.

 

The same tongue caught between his teeth is how they put the fire out. In the brittle vacuity, a kiss is currency; they trade twenty for a ripple of loosened fabric at his ankles. The heat sluices over—swelter, swelter. His thumbs are particularly fond of the depressions in the other’s hips, and each bumptious whine he teases out. They fuck, and everything is alright again. There is blood on both hands, or maybe it’s just their palms spuming with roses, whatever helps extinguish the ache faster.

 

But the reality was that it had never stopped burning. At some point they had just learnt how to kiss with the world blistering and ablaze.

  


Hyukjae stabs at the keypad of his door lock, desperate to decamp from a day’s worth of burdens. A slip of the finger spins mindless desperation into an erring _beep beep beep_ , and suddenly he remembers he had changed the passcode a week ago. The twenty-seven year old sighs, trying again, and the door clicks open into a hollow. Here he assumes the role of an errant lover. Here the place seems louder when it is quiet.

 

Somewhere behind him the assault of _beeps_ buffer and he lets the door shut before he slides back against it, folding. Inside, the living room opens modestly into a pocket of Seoul’s night sky; he sits with his chin rested defeatedly on his knees, lungs naked to the silence that embosoms him with open arms. Beside him, the grocery bags run into plastic creases, leaving just the ringlets of red chafed on his wrists. To be numb now, is to be privileged.  

 

Dinner… is nothing fancy, no candlelit table set for two. The convenience store downstairs decants romance in canned beer and a nondescript chicken sandwich. Loneliness teaches him that he’s not as meticulous as he thinks; he talks with a chest full of iron, tells himself he’s fine watching the sun limp toward the horizon, alone. That _jimjilbang_ trips are a waste of money anyway, that Valentine’s Day is overrated, and anniversaries are nothing more than a filmy excuse to fetch flowers. But in this inchoate hell television static fizzles through the air, electric—the cans from last night, still collapsed on their sides. Loneliness teaches him fear, of skin, of heat, of leaving his house, of coming back to it. Their old ghosts lie in the bedrock of this very place; they teach him that memories are his least favourite film, and that voicemail is his least favourite song.

 

Rubbing his eyes now he finds them wet, and through partial blurs makes out a stitch of light purling through the room like a river. For a moment he thinks he sees a flame again, but figures it’s just the saddened embers.

 

 _Why don’t we love._ **_Love_ ** _._

 

It’s in buzzcuts, and holding the sun in his hands, offering a fraction of his bleary, sleepy-eyed universe to the swell of the other’s chest. The name is Donghae, and he buys lemon meringues at the shop opposite the church in _Seodaemun_. He does small gigs at his brother’s cafe in his free time. He sings always.

 

It’s in honey spread on walnut-crusted toast, cream in his coffee, subtract sugar. It’s kissing the peach spot on his face over and over again, leaving breakfast to lunch and lunch to chiasmatic limbs fitted over a threadbare couch. Here donghae would plead, swallow me whole, and while it doesn’t need to hurt to feel good, it feels damn good to hurt.

 

Hyukjae’s lips turn, his smile ripe with grief. They’d had a lifetime of fun in those early days. But the next spring blooms, then leaves, bluntly. Work demands he leaves gutturals to the weekend, and the promotion means the bag on his shoulder gets heavier and Donghae forgets what it feels like to have his hips over the chipped edge of a dining table. The promise of pain doesn’t seem half as alluring in its concentrate, not with Hyukjae’s fingers missing from the flare of his ribs, not when they’re stumbling through purgatory looking for nectar.

 

Donghae had coped then in the same way he always did; by churning their arguments into lyrics, humming discord through the mellow strums of an acoustic guitar.

 

Hyukjae sighs, collecting himself from where he is crumpled on the floor. In some sense, Donghae was right—he _deserved_ this. He _deserved_ to reel.

 

But then maybe they both did, sprawled in the shells of their irascible young selves, ever lacking, bankrupt of the means to communicate in a medium that wasn’t entirely visceral. They had only ever trusted what they could feel.

 

Hyukjae gathers the crushed cans, slowly disposing of yesterday’s breakdown. A part of him had declared he would never grovel, but a part was exactly that, just a part. It occurs to him, now, that it had really been three arduous years, of love and of toil. He’d sworn off intimacy but at night he catches himself dreaming about flesh.

 

And if he indulged himself he’d dream now, wide awake and sober. The first spark starts on a Wednesday, paints his petulant lover against the sliding doors. Ugly contorts his face in the same way tears iridise his eyes.

 

_“Look, frankly, sometimes I just don’t care. I work my nine to nine job and… goddamnit the least you can do is not pick fights with every label that has ever given you a chance!”_

 

 _“What do you mean pick fights I—I make music the way I want_ — _you know this_ — _you of all people should know this! I’m an artist, Hyukjae, and I_ —”

 

_“—and I work a full time office job. I pay the rent, which is, if you haven’t seen the notice, increasing. If not for us, then for yourself, just… watching you sit there in your little fucking corner pretending to be Sufjan Stevens. A-And you know your dates with your pretentious, uppity ‘artist friends’… they come straight out of my pocket.”_

 

How quick an unchecked heart vaults. When he looks up he sees Donghae as an ugly reflection of himself.  

 

 _Why don’t we love._ **_Love_ ** _._

 

He remembers then, again, how it’s in breathing into kisses, in subtracting sugar, in arms extended towards an off-white ceiling; it’s the ephemeral high, the way Donghae’s nails curl into his back when he’s close, the way _Hyuk_ peters out whiningly into _jae_ , the way carmine spills in inlets down the ridges of his spine.

 

 _“… only asked why you don’t seem to care about us anymore… I… what I do, isn’t a fucking… hobby, you know, music, singing, writing… this is my means of living. YOU, you were the one who said that you liked that, you liked that about me, remember? When you took my fucking hand in yours that day in February when it didn’t stop raining and said I give you colour do you remember that? In your twenty-six humdrum years of a miserable, sorry excuse of an existence you said_ **_I_ ** _was the only thing worth beating for so don’t be too quick to rip the heart out of me because that makes two flatlines and my foot out the door faster than you can say ‘don’t go’. You do the math.”_

 

The memory upends and Donghae disappears, and suddenly, all that’s left in the desolation are stained hands and threat of acid up his throat. That had been a year ago, the first time a kiss meant something less than a kiss. And when the world had frozen over for a while, they’d put on their best shoes and ambled on thin ice, fires splintering in curled hands.

  


And then in the summer of this year, Hyukjae falters.

 

There isn’t a name to the face, but under a guttering neon light there’s hardly a face at all; only the cold press of a palm, nursing an incandescent cheek. Hyukjae doesn’t like to talk about this, and so he never does tell Donghae, but paranoia tells him Donghae knows anyway.

 

Because not long after Donghae starts writing happy songs again, and though he sings with the saddest of eyes Hyukjae knows he’s really singing for someone else. Unknowingly they had fallen out of each other’s favour, just like that. They were but two hands charred and begging for flames in a place where animosity had spun the walls to ashes.

  
  
  


_Donghae in February is awfully alluring._

 

_Hyukjae watches the rain part through said man’s fingers, with the same childish curiosity he extends towards him._

 

_“I like you.”_

 

_“Well I—”_

 

_“No, I like you, a lot.”_

 

_A prismatic glimmer of teeth, peeking from behind the smile. Hyukjae ushers in their nascent romance with the cold press of his palm against the other’s cheek._

 

_“You colour me.”_

  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

 

 

The final tap shows a list of archived chats.

 

“I’m sorry”, he begins to type, and the text bubbles into an aching deluge of several other unread messages all echoing the same troubled sentiment.

  


“Congrats on the record deal.”

 

 

 


End file.
